Corporate Finance

A recent Supreme Court ruling making it easier for retirement plan participants to sue organizations acting as plan sponsors should alert CEOs to scrutinize retirement plan investments on a regular basis.

ABC’s Shark Tank, which depicts owners of garage and kitchen startups pitching their request for investment capital to successful entrepreneurs and business leaders such as Mark Cuban, is a runaway success. Your needs may be significantly larger and more complex than the show’s contestants, but nonetheless, there are lessons that can be learned from it on how to approach a potential ...

The U.S. economic recovery has helped fuel a recent wave of mergers and acquisitions among mid-market companies, and Deloitte projects that the wave will continue in the months ahead. Yet prospects remain tentative enough that interest rates remain historically low, encouraging potential company buyers.

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt has some very specific reasons for launching a vast restructuring of the American industrial giant that will have the firm sell off GE Capital and exiting the financial services industry. But many of the forces that prompted Immelt’s major strategic move also afflict other financial-services companies, and these pressures aren’t going away.

A growing body of research has shown that 50% to 90% of acquisitions fail to pay off for acquirers. This means that traditional integration methods are not working. There are many reasons an acquisition might fail, but two recurring mistakes are the order and the depth at which the integration is tackled.

The world of investing can always be counted on to get roiled when Warren Buffett—the Oracle of Omaha—speaks, and he has done so again with his criticism of spin-offs. But he’s getting a lot of pushback from other investment professionals—and from the markets themselves as they tend to keep favoring major companies’ spin-off moves.

As CEOs reassess their portfolios due to heightened competition, divestitures are playing a more important role in corporate strategy. In particular, there was an exceptional increase in high-profile announcements in the U.S. technology sector in 2014. The total value of first-half 2014 transactions jumped 62% over the value of transactions in the first six months of 2013. Mega-deals accounted for more than 35% of total first-half 2014 deal value, including five deals worth more than $43 billion each—a level of activity not witnessed since before the financial crisis.

Shareholder value is an increasingly controversial topic in the C-suite. More and more business experts point to the unanticipated risks of the shareholder value approach, arguing that the purpose of a company must be to serve the customer, not to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.